1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed toward the field of document browsing systems, and more particularly to generating and displaying point of view gists of documents.
2. Art Background
A general purpose document browsing system operates in conjunction with a database or repository of source information. For example, a document browsing system may operate in conjunction with a repository that includes documents such as books, magazines, journals, etc. In general, the document browsing system permits a user to browse and access the repository to selectively retrieve documents, books, magazines, etc. available in the repository. Computers have increased the use of document browsing systems because a computer may access a database or repository of information from a remote location. The utility of a document browsing system is to permit a user to view one or more documents in the repository of information.
Prior art document browsing systems provide a number of functions for viewing and manipulating documents entered into the system. For example, the document browsing system may permit a user to view a list of documents available within the system. From the list, a user may choose to view the full text of the document. The full text of the document may be long and require a substantial investment of time for the user to read the entire document. Because of this, some prior art document browsing systems include abstract functions. In general, the abstract functions display, when invoked, an abstract of a selected document. The reader is then permitted to read the abstract to determine whether the user desires to view the entire document.
Typically, abstract functions in prior art document browsing systems attempt to provide an overview of a few topics contained in the corresponding document. However, a document typically includes one or more general topics and several subtopics that expand upon the high level topic. For example, an article about software may contain information about the computer industry, marketing of software, hardware platforms that run the software, etc. Because a document may contain many topics or subtopics, two different users may have different interests in the same document. For the example software article, a marketing professional in the software industry may be interested in the marketing aspects of the article, while a software engineer may be interested in the technical information contained within the article. Because prior art general purpose abstracts provide an overview of one or a few topics included in the document, the lack of attention to a particular area of interest may render the abstract useless for a user (e.g. the user still cannot tell from reading the abstract whether the document is useful for the users purpose). Therefore, it is desirable to develop a system that generates and displays abstracts slanted toward a point of view guided by the user.